Bluesky's development has been pretty democratic, moreso than Mastodon where one guy basically leads the entire trajectory of the fediverse (at least from a mainstream perspective) from what I heard.
As for Jack, hasn't been on Bluesky for a while now - he prefers Nostr. Even though he's on the board, he's not attended any meetings nor has he dictated how the platform should go. He just threw money at it and ran after the community didn't take him seriously.
This all implies Bluesky can be considered a massive tech corp (which it honestly isn't even with investors, definitely not compared to Meta, or even Mozilla at this point), and can even be monetised.
In the event that they do attempt that, users can move to a different PDS and not lose any of their data - that's how AT was built. While on AP, it's dependent on if the software powering the account supports migration, and even then I've not seen an implementation that carries over all of the user's data (Mastodon only does followers/following, Lemmy has no migration whatsoever). That's not to say it's impossible, but I've not seen it happen.
I think the moderation will be an uphill battle for Bluesky. I haven't seen a clear answer over how legal issues are going to be handled and generally, people want some form of moderation. Maybe not the extent that the fediverse has with its blocking drama.
But the resiliency against corporate capture and community ownership, meh I'm not really worried. I work with and use open-source projects that have been backed by corporations, Mastodon.social has already said they wish to federate with Threads, and there are corporations sponsoring (in the case of mastodonapp.uk) or outright owning instances (in the case of Flipboard, Mozilla Social and Vivaldi Social). Bluesky seems to be built on the notion that it too will be a possible adversary in the future, so the protocol is being built with that in mind.
Why would you use Gentoo for criminal activity over any other operating system
Funnily enough, someone actually did get arrested for allegedly building a Gentoo-based distro for ISIS.
Gentoo can be good if you desire some very weird or exotic configurations or just want more granular customisability that binary DIY distros don't offer. The way it's built allows that in a way that makes it easier there. If you don't really need that and aren't a fan of the build times, it won't hurt going for something like Void or Arch which are also DIY distros but all-binary so you don't need to worry. (unless you use xbps-src or the AUR).
Before I hopped onto Bluesky, I was one of those fediverse evangelists trying to get my friends onto it. Except, I couldn't give a solid answer to the fediblock problem, and my friends definitely saw right through it or were confused about it. And I can't blame them. They don't want to worry about federation, or whether one instance will be blocked by the other over some drama. Meanwhile since Bluesky has been opening up more, I've only seen the fediverse grow more toxic towards Bluesky, to the point where it's exhausting to be part of.
AFAIK, Bluesky started on ActivityPub at first, but then it was decided to make a new protocol which resulted in Atproto. It also started as an internal project at Twitter, was funded by Jack, but then as it got popular amongst a more regular audience, he left when he kept getting pestered with @ mentions and anti-crypto stuff. He hangs out at Nostr now and from what I've been told, isn't really involved in Bluesky's meetings.
There was an effort to bridge Bluesky/Atproto, ActivityPub and also Nostr together - Bridgy Fed - for when Bluesky started getting their protocol federating outside its own network. The issue was, the creator made it opt-out rather than opt-in. The AP fediverse collectively shat themselves, spreading their delusions about Bluesky, one guy called the creator a rapist for using public data and another threatened to sue/fine the creator. It was absolutely bonkers and that incident exemplifies a good part of why people find the fediverse to be toxic, moreso than anything involving Threads.
Yeah, from some cursory glances and following of AT devs, some things I understand the logic of and some things I'm thinking "isn't this a bit over-engineered?"
EndeavourOS might be worth a try if you miss the AUR, but if you don't like the maintenance associated with Arch's rolling release strategy then I'd stick to Debian.
I'm probably going to stick with Arch, or maybe EndeavourOS.
I've hopped from distro to distro but I always keep coming back to Arch. The reason I use Arch is that it's my weird sweet spot of "DIY" and "it just works". It gives me a blank slate at first, but it lets me paint the canvas with whatever I want, however I want. It allows for some weird setups (like VFIO, for instance) and the wiki really helps with that. I don't really use the AUR nowadays unless it's for a package only available there, so I can't say anything about that. I use Flatpak nowadays. Some people might prefer the AUR, that's good for them! Right now it's just not for me.
If I do distro-hop again, I'll probably go for EndeavourOS just to have an Arch install that leans heavier on the "just works" side of things.
I'll just use ChatGPT standalone, lol. Or cheat.sh.